Launched to provide an information service connected with _Toward a Bioregional State, the book; the blog is the commentary, your questions and my answers, and news from around the world related to the issues of sustainability and unsustainability in a running muse on various issues of concern or inspiration.

Wednesday, April 08, 2015

The Best Politics of the World

Seen in this documentary, I was thinking far more of the living Himalayan happiness on their faces than these long forgotten secret towers. Across the Himalayas, these silent, nameless, unused and even ownerless towers are dead and unrequired in their lives—only towering testaments to the lost hubris of trading towns, violent states, prideful families, and Silk Road strings snapped by Mongol invasions. The culture that built the secret towers rotted away, leading to the towers decline. However, their culture of happiness remains.

Some of the happy people of the region and some of the decayed towers

The (Bio)Regional Secrets of Happiness

Even though the historical origins and the original cultural meanings of these Himalayan towers animated this scholar’s quest to research and produce this film, other scholars like Helena Norberg-Hodge have been animated by asking questions about why they are so happy without towers, and why they got unhappier with them.

To any scholar of the world who studies social organization and hunts down the elusive recipes for high quality of life, this region haunts them. First, it haunts them because there are sadly very few global or historical areas of high quality of life that we can learn from. Second, it haunts them because a seemingly very difficult environment for people with little material perks is one of the areas with these historically high levels of quality of life. This is an ironic slap in the face to current European/Western notions (lets call it, for what it is, corporate advertising) of 'happiness through scaled development'. Hodge found that the people of this region experienced true unhappiness for the first time in their memory through Western scaled development ideas, and a decline in their quality of life when they left their own regional development. Many simply failed to understand they had developed something worthwhile regionally until it was destroyed: high levels of subjective quality of life even with the lack of objective (material) quality of life. Can we develop both simultaneously instead of making the loss of the former at the expense of the latter?

In this area today, there are very few parts of the Himalayas fortunate enough to be undisturbed for long periods by larger repressive imperial projects that pushed like political tectonics upon. In recent centuries, this is because this region of many regionally isolated peoples were pushed from the Russian/Tibetan north, the Indian south, the Ottoman west, and the Chinese/Mongolian east. Across this tiny snow-capped lining of mountains that is the southern skirt of Inner Asia, we have Ladakh in the west, to Bhutan in the east, to the more isolated regions of eastern Tibet and Chinese Sichuan. Some of these tiny populations of ethnic minorities still live in isolated, roadless valleys under the shadows of the Himalayan towers. They are the people seemingly so happy with so little.

The rationales why they are so happy is likely a shock to those raised in larger empires as a norm. Instead, these people are happy because they have been living [1] in particular regions [2] for long periods [3] without ongoing external political projects of others bothering them [4] that they ‘naturally’ develop sustainable economic and cultural habits in their region that tends to be treated under commons management [5] and as a flower of this social organization they develop a blooming biological longevity of long-useful lives instead of long term isolated senescence [6] tied to their diet and material choices [7] and tied to that true development no one can buy or manufacture: an ongoing regionalized culture linked their diet and material choices and social organizations that are simultaneous and infrastructurally required to their happiness.

This is hardly a utopia. It is a real place, created by real people, still with real ongoing problems. It is harsh. There is always room for improvement. So it is important to avoid romanticizing such situations given how quick they reach for the satellite TV images of other lives presented to them once available.

However, what is more ignored is that it is equally important to stop romanticizing what the TV sells: a self-proclaimed pro-consumer, conflict-free, permanent amusement and ease of life. This scaled mass political, cultural, and economic development from the West (or from China or India for that matter) that is behind the scenes of these images is really a form of underdevelopment of the regional happiness they already have. It can be a hideous devolution and dystopia sold with a cynical smile and typically at the butt of a gun. It can be bought with a gullible naivete as people’s local jurisdictions and infrastructures are taken away from them, as their future images of themselves are traded for a two-dimensional someone else, elsewhere, truly tantalizing and yet completely out of reach.

For example, [8] as that regional happiness infrastructure is politically undermined and even voluntarily eroded in delusional images of future improvement, they are asked to undervalue their current lives and elements of already developed kinds of happiness. More often than otherwise, trading in their futures for someone else's futures removes far more happiness than it brings, despite inverted promises to the contrary. Such future promises of entirely scaled and delocalized development are mystifications ever broken, ever postponed, and ever pushed further into a future that never comes, and is never meant to come. Current Western ideas of 'development as larger scale' are ideas of regional and cultural self-destruction, biodiversity destruction, sustainability destruction, environmental degradation, and external imperial, corporate, bank and educational institutional control that undermines the value of any four other respective options for these social services already there.

Each novel scaled institutional tendril touches people’s lives with tantalizing promises of future images, yet made false by corruptly installed and mostly externally sponsored unrepresentative leaderships that help to siphon away any wealth, control and cultural strengths instead of actually providing development, democracy, and higher quality of life. Their whole happiness development unravels instead of improves. It unravels into the more ephemeral and short term ways of happiness seeking (instead of happiness development) recognizable worldwide--ever chased and never lasting or caught, like a receding mirage. Such ongoing short term happiness is the desperate happiness of the alienated, alienated from each other, and particularly alienated from any other alternative from their own past and from any clear stable future. Another factor alienated in all this short-term happiness seeking is their immediate and wider environment that ceases to have human connections except as a garbage sink for dreams bought elsewhere and dropped along the road to somewhere. The desperate happiness of the alienated is moved to the short term material, which suits such external empires just fine for those that provide for it (historically since drug trades were state sponsored forms of control and fuzzy thinking of their charges and laborers, instead of merely means of state finance). Locals soon require the ongoing fix to ignore how their long term situations are now out of their control, as they endlessly rush after their next short term fix. Sometimes that fix is based on images they are only aping in advertisements, television, magazines, or now the internet. Sometimes it is drugs, or violence, or ethnic gangs, or short term fads that are endlessly exchanged for the next one without satisfaction throughout (since it would hardly be a fad if it did provide happiness). Sometimes that fix is someone's promised social mobility that will hit a glass ceiling soon because they are still from a parochial world that will be unable to compete with generations upon generations of others already established elsewhere employing the same culture, materialist issues, and status they seek. This leaves them doubly alienated in a netherworld: alienated both from what they were that is undermined in their minds as valueless, and alienated from what they were promised they could become that is withdrawn at the last moment only after they have already burned their bridges that alienate them from past resources they might fall back upon. Children vacate the dreams of their fathers, and both are alone.

So because they are so happy with so little, and because that little that makes them happy is more grandly linked to an infrastructurally regional situation under their immediate creation and control, their happiness decays and underdevelops when they are (typically under open threats of violence) attempted to be made into merely another placeless region of a wider placeless empire, alienated as part of another’s vast scaled infrastructure of various political, cultural, and economic projects.

It is becoming clear to most intelligent observers that such larger projects are run by self-destructive leaders that are themselves shamelessly alienated from what they are doing in destroying others happiness, touching them with false promises to bring happiness instead of really taking it away and leading only to generation upon generation of alienation like themselves.

Lies require vehicles of words and images to travel in to be packaged and sold, just as sustainability requires other vehicles of words and images recognized and appreciated enough to form other patterns, other futures.

Meanwhile, others’ words and images of faux recommendations like ‘scaled development,’ ‘promised higher quality of life’ and ‘higher civilization’ bring it only to only the traditionally well-connected few while denying it to a vast majority, dividing themselves from each other.

The irony of course is that they were already happily developed, with what most people would now consider as so little, while multi-generational anguish, sadness and ennui exists among politicized billionaires in their towers who have “too much” versus the disenfranchised billions of precariats in the slums in the shadows of their towers who truly have “too little.” What passes for 'Western development' now is really generating a large feudal globalist ruling class of billionaire nepotistic dynasties, tiny outposts of high consumerism global cities as their glittering courts, with billions of people in slum conditions worldwide, and massive corporatist war-profiteering police states. Development? I think not. This is globalized feudalization still pretending it is 'development.' There has been a mass rush toward greater material development and many billions have indeed been pulled out of poverty in the past half century of 'cold war' peace, where nuclear war was "too dangerous" to launch. This kept and held open much larger global trading access to many of the world's populations--particularly in India, East Asia, and at least the more island-based Southeast Asia. However, many other areas 'missed the boat' on that due to living in (foreign maintained) ongoing destabalized areas and are virtually living in the 14th century even as many others are living in the 21st. Others 'missed the boat' because they find it hard to entirely remove themselves from material underdevelopment of being raw material procuring economies ruled by oligarchic elites tied to the global economy who are uninterested in aiding their own populations. Meanwhile, environmental degradation proceeds because of this scaled choice of rootless development. Meanwhile, the development of happiness seems hardly to proceed at all as related to all these scaled corporate and imperial endeavors, and instead happiness seems clearly inversely underdeveloping with widening inequalities and de-regionalization.

It is astounding to watch most places in the world repeatedly generate an undesired recipe of life that no one wants to eat and no one is satisfied with by the time it is well baked. Meanwhile, such a recipe uses as fuel regional happiness and burns it away despite it being the far more savvy, long-term, knowledgeable recipe of human life that is being unappreciated and undervalued. Sustainable and happy ways of life are lost in this process of ever growing waiting on false promises to develop. The claim of scaled development as the road to happiness is the ultimate "waiting for Godot" that only expands human unhappiness the longer people wait upon it. In short, these positive regional happiness patterns and these negative scaled development patterns of underdeveloped happiness in this region of the world should haunt anyone because what is happening there is exactly what has happened worldwide. It is repeating once more.

Trialectics and a Green Theory of History

My own work falls between these two scholastic extremes—the extreme
of only political and material history (“tracking the tower builders”
like Darragon above) versus the extreme of only looking for intangible
cultural history (“tracking the people in the shadow of the towers,”
like Hodge). I’m interested in these ongoing relationships between the "tower builders"--the political jurisdictional projects of history--and their relations with regional cultures. I'm interested in what are these comparative secrets and
patterns of how to balance and how to achieve a high objective and high
subjective qualities of life. I'm interested in the secrets of how comparatively
such human happiness is lost, as well as regained. Both can be learned. This kind of knowledge falls in
between political history, cultural history, and environmental history.
Next, I attempt to summarize half a lifetime of study in the next few
pages.

There are many competing perspectives to analyze the world. However, because people tend to follow singular narrative views for their sense of attachment, value, and identity, few step back to analyze any ongoing plural competition of different narratives with each other because that gives the singular proselytization game away if a particular ideology or narrative is just examined at one remove, situated for where it exists in particular strategies, minds, leaderships, followers, and geographies that are with and against other ones just the same.

I suggest doing the latter analysis: tracking plural perspectives’ strategic and tactical jurisdictional extensions with and against each other instead of selectively trying to proselytize a singular perspective. This helps us to understand major ‘trialectical’ patterns and a ‘green theory of history’ mostly unnoticed by those singular other perspectives caught up in their own narrative webs, unable to see the wider webs in which their own narratives are couched with and against others, strategically in space.

Past or present in the world, three major positional discourses of politics and narrative tend to fall into a tripartite dynamics of state centralization, or state privatization, or state regionalism. Each of these three positional kinds of discourses attempt to sponge up everyone into their exclusive belief narratives with and against each other, leaving very few to analyze their ongoing open and unpredictable plural dynamics strategically and tactically with and against each other as the actual basis of history. In our present globalized world, it is much the same as the past though on larger scales, still with two of the former of these tripartite discourses battling with and against each other, as well battling with and against a multiplicity of geographic regionalisms (that battle against each other as well).

Currently, the two larger discourses are the jurisdictional, mental and narrative worlds of Marxism and Smithianism. These tripartite dynamics are both with and against exclusive regionalism, itself in its own mutually opposed current stripes: libertarianism, communism, green politics of various sorts, utopian communities, religious cults, gaia worship, regional environmental movements, regional development movements, and a plethora of admixtures of these instead of these 'different movements' being so clearly different--like religious-environmental-developmental movements, or libertarian-religious-development movements, or admixed science-religious and green environmental movements. Greens and libertarians even work together regionally while their rootless leadership ideologies on larger abstract scales tend to disagree. In comparative retrospect, these many different languages of regionalism and narratives of social identity and belief are different versions of the same ‘positional’ concerns, and they are more regional positional concerns that are animated against the more unrepresentative and alienating abstracts of the larger two positional pressures.

Such three ‘modern’ (and not so modern) positional discourses attempt to sponge up everyone into their exclusive belief narratives. The larger jurisdictional forces attempt to sponge up only winnowed and selective versions of any current regional ideas they find amenable to their extending control, just as they can jettison and repress other parts of such regional concerns. (This is clearly seen in the attempt of state centralization or even global consolidation to sponge up green politics; it is clearly seen in the attempt of state privatization of global corporations to sponge up libertarian principles.) The same kinds of tripartite dynamics existed among ‘pre-modern’ arrangements as well. (State elites would attempt to sponge up whatever regional kinds of identifications that helped them extend jurisdictional alliance hegemony and leadership on the regional level; just as other aristocratic groups may sometimes go along, or attempt other kinds of strategies to keep this from occurring in 'their' region.) So it is far from useful analytically to frame some versions of these tripartite dynamics as ‘modern’ while other versions of them are framed as ‘pre-modern’ if they are all the same tripartite dynamics. By comparisons, we can provide insight into both our more durable historical dynamics and our current political dynamics at the same time.

First, such an ongoing analysis of multiple different positions strategically in space has been ignored because mostly spatial relations of power and culture has been ignored in history entirely in the attempt to concentrate only on abstract time. Second, such an ongoing trialectical analysis has been ignored because of the (narrative) fiction that such infrastructures of social life are only singularly shared by all as internally aligned to them instead of held to for various different unaligned and different rationales to the same particular social behaviors. This means that any particular kinds of social life is ongoingly unstable, challenged, and ever altered infrastructurally by all contenders in the present seeking different futures attempting to branch from the same current arrangements of social life. This makes social life more of an ongoing negotiated conditional accommodation. At the same moment, different individuals and groups can be challenging the same current conditional accommodations of social life with change or defection to their own particular social life, while others are attempting to stop them by attempting in turn to make some others live under the infrastructural standards of others that attempt to remove their choices of action and even thought. This can be done by active acculturation, active repression, or both simultaneously. There can be ongoing variations in how different groups or individuals are treated, case by case, as well.

Instead, by such past and present comparisons of such tripartite dynamics we can analyze what, if any, are the more regular jurisdictional trends chosen in such dynamics, and what, if any, were their more comparative implications at being chosen. Part of what we can learn from such a Green Theory of History has been published in the book Ecological Revolution (2009).

However, the first step on this knowledge path is yours, and it likely means stepping off your current path of narrative into the forest to look at all the different roads currently competing as they move through the forest. We can learn much more about ourselves sociologically by refusing to be simply blind followers of one singular or abstract road through this forest of history, i..e, blind followers of any one positional discourse that aims to mystify and to ignore its real world strategic and spatial battles with and against other particular discourses as the actual basis of social life. We can learn more about chosen jurisdictional trends over time this way as well, at least in comparative retrospect while respecting the open unpredictable present and the open unpredictable future of such dynamics that rely only on our ongoing choices.

What Does This Have to Do With Happiness?

To understand how to be happy, means understanding and defending ourselves from the different dead ends of narrative routes toward it promoted by various jurisdictional/political projects that do their best to demote regionally developed happiness and do their best to demote much wider understandings among different peoples as well.

To be truly comparatively analytical about ourselves in history, we have to do better than singular narratives that follow only one jurisdiction’s rise and fall in artificial isolation. Such artificial (yet 'normal' jurisdictionally acculturative) stories—of artificially stable good guys, artificially stable bad guys, artificially framed stable presents and artificially framed predictable closed futures—ignore their jurisdictional rearrangements and changes of strategy and tactics occur ongoingly between them. Such singularly closed narratives tend to ignore ongoing alliances of the good guys and bad guys under certain terms, the mere conditional accommodations, betrayals, loyalties, splits, and any subsequent and ongoingly adjusted or tested alliances that try to push conditionally accommodative terms to different groups' advantages.

So these three ‘empty’ positions in history can be used as a substitute for the various closed biases of any singular narratives. Our ongoing chosen open strategies and tactics with and against each other in space can be noted for its chosen dynamics as well as for any of its ongoing implications, in comparative retrospect. These trialectical dynamics are more regular yet more unstable since as one jurisdiction and its alliance and disalliances aggregatedly declines, other kinds of jurisdictions are aggregating as anothers’ disallaince expands. These trialectical dynamics are more unpredictable as well as unstable social aggregations around particular conditional accommodations can dissolve slowly or quickly as wider choice matrices change, or as changing aggregate interpretations about the same situation occurs even if the same ongoing deal is maintained to little avail anymore as aggregate internal interpretations about it have changed. In comparative retrospect, several different ongoing chosen trends of jurisdictional transformations can be sponsored into shifting existence as well.

In short, we have to have some basis of comparisons of these plural dynamics instead of simply reach for the mutually hostile reductionisms in singular narratives, in order fairly to address the ongoing open competitions and conditional accommodations seen in history in strategy and tactics in space that are between various singular jurisdictional attempts over others. This is contrary to exclusively being interested ideologically in putting our whole analysis (and our whole push toward future happiness and identification) into a singular narrative world of only one jurisdictional contender in its dynamics with others.

In short, there are two difficulties here to be checked against in our social analysis.

First, we should disaggregate our singular narrative views of history into the analysis of political narrative competition. This is an ongoing competition over what is to be the singular hegemonic discourse and jurisdictional infrastructural arrangement among and against many other choices of it, among many different alternatives of it. Reliance on singular false narratives project lies about history by typically talking of a predictable past, a predictable present, predictable actors, predictable interactive relations, and predictable general causalities and predicted closed futures that promise to bring happiness. This has mystified the ongoing unpredictability of the past (when it was the present), and it has mystified the plural different routes toward happiness that were contending with each other strategically in space, and it has mystified the ongoing more conditionally accommodating deals of the past between different groups and how they shifted in choice of their happiness and over time. This kind of narrative world has mystified the ongoing unpredictability of the present or the future as well, that only depends on ongoing choices of investment in particular kinds of aggregations over other particular kinds of aggregations instead narrative ever being a useful way to think about social life as if there was only one story or as if it was some universal shared 'abstract.' Social life is different projects and different promises and different strategies interacting with and against each other in space, and this develops into a trialectical dynamics that singular narratives are unable to discuss because social life is plural and because it is unpredictably and entirely open in the present and in the future. This means we have to study ongoing strategies and tactics and jurisdictional alliance extensions in the plural as well.

Hiding away our ongoing unpredictable world of strategy and tactics of everyone as the ongoing basis of social life is the job of the whitewash and broad brush of singular narratives, claiming 'historical inevitability,' or 'regular structural patterns,' or 'general causalities,' or 'durable relationships and interactions, etc.' This is modern day storytelling through ostensible social science. This low use of social science to built singular narrative worlds may be 'normal,' though we have to be better than normal to understand these kind of dynamics of narrative versus narrative in order to place them in their own historical strategies and spaces as with and against each other. This means with their contingent successes and failures at active acculturation and repression extension of themselves against others. Such low uses of social science as singular narrative has hidden how there is a ‘trialectical’ dynamics going on in history.

This trialectics is an ongoing open and entirely contingent dynamics strategically and tactically across space. So this is a case specific yet common ‘trialectics,’ quite different in its chosen particulars in different cases and yet in comparative retrospect developing the same emergent positional dynamics with and against each other as two dueling larger distanciated narratives connected to extending and aggregating people to their own allied infrastructures or attempting to utilize the existing infrastructures of each other in their own stratagems as well, as they battle each other in the same cases. Equally they are battling with and against various other more geographic regionalisms of identity and jurisdictional interest. These latter multiple regionalisms of course can be battling with ‘themselves’ (sic) as well, instead of artificially presuming 'a regional interest' is always predictably unified or the same abstract everywhere either. However, in some situations, conditionally such cross-regional alliances can exist sometimes. However, it is always only a contingent creation of ongoing human strategies and tactics to do so, instead of predictable. This is exactly like any of these larger spatial-strategic jurisdictional arrangements as well that aggregate and disaggregated based on more than just what they are doing, and are based on what their ongoing challengers are doing, believing and narrating as well.

Second, the difficulty is in attempting to express, in the terms of any of these three kinds of tripartite narratives, how each of them are based on potential alienations and omissions of analysis when each mystify they are complete perspectives on social life and when each of them encourage people to think they are the only useful analysis by themselves, instead of really far more useful as just part of a wider ongoing plurality of strategic and tactical dynamics in space with and against each other that none of them in the singular can ever express. For example, each singular hegemonic narrative battles with other hegemonic narratives-that-are-or-wish-to-be for mental and physical territory, while ignoring how each jurisdictional argument ‘recommends’ itself mostly in attempts to selectively acculturate or alienate youth to it instead of to convince adults, or ‘recommends’ itself mostly via attempts to repress, meaning, to violently impress ideas and implications on all others. This kind of ongoing antics of all can be guided through four different research areas, though this is an entirely different topic.

We return to the misleading kinds of narrative views of reified happiness that we are offered by different exclusive clubs. These are equally alienating to the kind of regionally developed happiness that is living and real. This is particularly so, though hardly exclusively so, now in the larger Marxist or Smithian ideologies still. Both still seek to create their larger arrangements of belief and narrative followers built on creating and seeding alienation of people from each other in various regionalisms in particular, and yet, due to the lack of representation in ongoing current regionalisms as well, of course equally have been only opportunistically feeding upon other such created alienations in peripheralized groups already facilitated by unrepresentative regionalisms themselves. So in much of trialectical history, different jurisdictional projects are locked together in mutually unrepresentative ways, attempting to seed divisions and alienations in their challengers, while of course only feeding on the divisions and alienations already seeded by those challengers as well.

So within the wider trialectical dynamics, there are two kinds of ongoing alienations that these singular jurisdictional attempts each attempt to build themselves upon, ‘seeding’ kinds of alienation based on their own strategies and tactics as well as ‘feeding’ kinds of alienation based on opportunistically appealing to peripherialized groups already marginalized by unrepresentative others. Trialectical dynamics in comparative retrospect proceed particularly when each of the leaderships of all three positions are choosing more unrepresentative appeals with and against each other. Therefore, in these plural dynamics of different singular jurisdictional attempts of acculturation and power, each tend to step into the breach created by the unrepresentative arrangement of jurisdiction of others, feeding on the alienation created by others, at the same time they are seeding the alienation of others as well, in the way that they attempt to extend themselves with and against others divisively as well as in a (re)grouping manner simultaneously.

On the one hand, any version of this kind of mutually unrepresentative dynamics can be just as unrepresentative and alienating as what it is attempting to replace. On the other hand, of course it is just a contingent choice to extend such unrepresentative divide and conquer strategies upon others to regroup them. Equally in history, more representative strategies and tactics can be chosen as well. However in comparative retrospect, meaning at least so far, more unrepresentative extensions interlock with each other in this way.

So keeping both difficulties in mind, the challenge is developing a way to critique all singular tripartite perspectives simultaneously, while recognizing their empirical importance in particular cases yet only in their ongoing open dynamics. The challenge is expressing this trialectical dynamics in such a way without it being interpreted as just part of any singular ongoing partisan strategic and tactical battles with each other. To the contrary, trialectics is the analysis of their more tripartite strategic and tactical battles with each other, period. It fails to have a narrative. It is a method of exploring and tracking history for what we have chosen to do more regularly in history as well as what have been the more regular implications of such choices, without attempting to predict the still unpredictably open present and future.

As said above, all three major positional discourse worlds of state centralization or state privatization or state regionalization attempt to sponge up everyone into their exclusive belief narratives with and against each other, leaving few to analyze their ongoing plural dynamics strategically and tactically with and against each other.

Building a Better Politics for Happiness

There is a third implication, about building a better politics from this knowledge.

This better politics would be a more representative dynamics instead building on past and present versions of singular mutually opposed alienations and unrepresentative strategies and tactics.

Equally, it would be based on the observation that isolated regional happiness, though potentially happy, is truly hard to defend and become durable if it is without any allies against massive projects of happiness underdevelopment pushing at it from all sides.

It would be built on the pragmatic knowledge that different kinds of subjective regional quality of life/happiness is for different people, though they can all have the same material quality of life in sustainable materials and enough for their uses, and they can all travel around as they change their mind.

It would be built on the pragmatic knowledge that scaled development will continue to exist, so it is best to provide other simultaneous forms of regional development that check and balance it and provide more choices, since such scaled development is a form of reduction of choices.

On scaled development, there is nothing the matter with ongoing trade between regions as long as they set their own terms of whether it will or will be avoided, and there is nothing the matter with ongoing trade between regions unless it begins to generate larger scaled externalities within its own region or any regions downstream. In that event, there are the larger checks and balances like population leaving the region as well as ongoing wider nested watershed jurisdictional issues that can come into play to bring such regional development back into sustainable strategies and choices.

It would be built on the pragmatic knowledge that hardly all regional forms of politics and culture are hardly
utopian anyway, so this requires all peoples having ongoing access to other kinds of external
checks and balances as well. Moreover, since hardly everyone wants to live
regionally like this anyway, other plural options besides regionalism should be durably provided instead of promoting only one particular kind of social life. Trialectics developed because regional ways of life were unrepresentative and because multiple regions developed frictions with and against each other, so other options of wider and more scaled and centralized appeal and conflict management could develop or take advantage of such a situation. Equally, more aristocratic or provincial forms of regional leaderships developed because such state centralization and conflict management can become a form of conflict creation itself and be unrepresentative as well, instead of always presuming such centralization is interested in the wider public good. Moreover, this can equally be said for more provincial checks and and balances on such centralized powers. Periods of regionalism (re)develop in history because such 'middle level' provincial/aristocratic checks and balances on state centralization can be corrupted as well into just highly repressive provincial kinds of privatized larger government over such regions and with such groups taking over the centralized arrangements as well in state privatization. In short, all three trialectical positions provide something good in the human condition and yet can be corrupted into providing something bad. All three positions of power, culture, and alliance are the ongoing outcome of human checks and balances against the unrepresentative qualities of any other one of them. So having all of these options in our social life in a balanced way is important in a high quality of life, instead of reducing ourselves to only one kind of regional social life.

So what is the best politics in the world then, if singular versions of it are mostly all forms of alienation in some way?

First, the best politics would be the politics that allows every community in the world regionally, representatively, and without alienation, to decide on their own leaderships, their own ever-changeable policies, material uses, and cultural hegemonies, by ongoing wider democratic debate, combined with human freedom of travel for all to move around to different communities.

Equally, second, once that first point is solved, the best politics of the world requires more than that. The next level of the best politics in the world would be how to address combinations of such multiple regions for their ongoing voluntary associations across each other, once all those sustainably adapted and representative regional communities of democratic groups start working with or against each other as they geophysically abut each other and as their ongoing pollution flows, if any, innately would be flowing across each other instead of so regionally alone in these two issues per se, ever. So additionally, as added to the first level, without demoting the first, is how to develop more checked and balanced representative politics between them all, instead of this kind of wider politics being used as a feint for violently or divisively introducing an ongoing unrepresentative alienation that would lead to the erosion of the representative plural regionalisms per se by attempting to seed alienations and divisions on the regional level as the way such larger jurisdictions were advanced.

The trick in the best politics of the world then is how to develop both ongoing representative and sustainable regionalism without decay into unrepresentative and degradative jurisdictions and alienations, as well as how to develop larger representative and sustainable cross-regionalism without decay into unrepresentative and degradative jurisdictions and without it being based on preying on destroying the representative regionalism per se.

In short, there are two kinds of the best politics in the world: an ongoing open deliberative politics that removes regional alienation of people from each other so that they can more representatively obtain material sustainability as well as their own input on what they want their cultural hegemonies to be, which can be understandably different materially and culturally than other regions of the world; and, second, a politics that is brought up later based on the success of the former, in how to organize greater checks and balances between very different sustainable regional areas of high objective and subjective quality of life yet doing it in a way without seeding regional alienation and undermining the plurality of ongoing regional variations that have already been arrived at by representative politics for themselves.

If the first kind of best politics in the world is more representative versions of regional democratic decision making processes on ongoing material and cultural aspects, then the second kind of best politics in the world is how to network those various regions together to check and balance against each other’s potential unrepresentative treatments of each other without compromising what made them representative in the first place.

Conclusion

So to begin the best politics in the world, we are required to avoid reaching for various singular past narratives of how to get happiness ‘off the shelf,’ as it were, as all alienating and just tactics designed as part of current trialectical stratagems. Equally, we should avoid pre-choosing leaders already so warped as to only be interested in violently alienating some other regional people from each other even as they assemble others. If so much of the cultural creations of the past or the present are involved in these kinds of trialectical dynamics, then most current narratives built into politics and history and identity are part of the problem in that they seed other kinds of unrepresentative alienations even as they remove it.

To begin the best politics in the world, we are required to be interested in facilitating communities regionally with each other to more representatively decide upon their own leaderships by more representative regional means instead of to import into them or to implant into them from outside. Then they can decide what they want after that by more representative means, instead of interested in imposing some prefabricated ideas or jurisdictional powers over themselves which would allowing them to develop their own alienations of themselves in their own regions.

How can this be done?

We are talking about a wider Ecological Reformation of human social life that involves four organizational areas: states, education, consumption, and finance. This Ecological Reformation is an additive one, instead of a repressive subtractive one. Some of this open democratic facilitation materially can be started with the Commodity Ecology Institution (CEI). Some of this open democratic facilitation culturally can be started with the Community Democratic Institution (CDI).

What happens then is literally just up to you.

Both are for webbing together representative forums. One of them is for how people can come to more transparent arrangements and to understand how to arrange for the present and the ongoing future better material choices in their regions. The other is for how people can develop their own recognition of better cultural heroes and leaderships in their regions without relying on existing alienating leaderships, without however creating mere fresh clientelistic ones that will unrepresentatively reduce others' current choices in the process, something far more typical than people imagine.

So the best politics in the world is additive to whatever already exists instead of violently subtractive or alienating to what exists already. The interest is in facilitating more of others choices toward those others’ ongoing representative modification of themselves, instead of being just another singular ploy in being subtractive and alienating to people’s choices by imposing one’s prefabricated own.

In conclusion, the best politics in the world is the facilitation of others’ ongoing capacities for self-generated leaderships, choice, reflection, representation and sustainability on their terms instead of any externally prefabricated abstract. Instead, we should defend our different regions worldwide from any prefabricated leaderships, narratives, and external promises of development as false promises and as violent impositions and curtailments in our social lives. Instead, the best politics in the world is an Ecological Reformation and Toward a Bioregional State.

If you want it, you can organize your own Shangri-La or bioregional oasis anywhere out of this mostly alienated desert of the world, even though it will always be challenged in its existence by the encroaching short-term ignorance and interests of others--and by its own members falterings over time perhaps as well falling for such external alienations. Of course you will keep coming up against unrepresentatively organized psychopathic leaders, ambivalent followers, and marginalized subalterns, all built into unrepresentative jurisdictions of larger business in general, in some materials in particular, and in various particulars of corrupt states worldwide that are politically creating and advancing their own short term ecological tyrannies without any long-term future in it.

The fact that your own Shangri-La or bioregional oasis has to be organized, strategically and tactically, means that equally any jurisdiction can be organized, strategically and tactically, well or poorly. It can be used badly to constrain choices and options as much as it can be used well to provide and to protect wider choices and ongoing deliberated changes. Choices matter. Strategies stratify. We are unable to have predictable recipes for how different groups will achieve their sustainability or how other groups will achieve their self-destruction. Equally, you will have to steel yourselves to meet people like Hamlet in the world, people built into their fatalism and ambivalence and thus terrified of making decisions or actions for leaving it for something better.

In this green theory of history, so both this positive Ecological Reformation and this negative ecological tyranny can be understood as openly strategically and tactically, each attempting to get the better of each other. However, either are only human choices to build heavens or to build hells instead of fates. Our mere human choices have to be explained and explored in terms of their open strategic and tactical extensions in how they battle with and against each other. This kind of ongoing battle is explained in the green theory of history, and the strategic and spatial patterns in which such a battle occur are explained in trialectical dynamics. Both issues are seen in the same cases worldwide, past or present.

Degradation is only a choice, a bad tragic choice with bad tragic degradative and unrepresentative implications, instead of what some narratives attempt to spin it into being: some functional requirement as the Marxists or Malthusians would brainwash you to think. Sustainability is equally only a choice, a choice instead of what some narratives attempt to spin it into being: a functional requirement of upcoming fate that the Ecological Modernizationists would brainwash you to think. Both such unrepresentative degradative and representative sustainable trends are hardly only modern phenomena either, as both would like to brainwash you to believe such issues of degradation or sustainability are exclusively modern existential problems. To the contrary, both the history of human choices toward environmental degradation and unrepresentative jurisdictions are very old, just as the human history of human choices toward environmental improvement and more representative and sustainable relations are very old as well. Both are the same as what is occurring now, typically on much larger scales than the past. This is the green theory of history, and this deeper historical issue involved in degradation and sustainability, in unrepresentation and representation, is why most 'moderns' caught up in their modern narratives seem to be blindly leading us backwards into the desert of the feudal past, because their modernist blinders keep them unable and unwilling to see comparative processural issues between themselves now and what happened in the past.

However, keep in mind fate is on no one's side. Act now. Neither a representative sustainability nor a unrepresentative degradation are ‘required by any intellectual system’ per se to occur. Both are only ongoing arrangements, ongoingly created, chosen, and chosen to be recreated. If this means I support the slow erosion of belief in many existing wider alienating interpretations and false sureties—whether modernist, Marxist, Smithian, Malthusian, or even some bioregionalist hegemonies—so be it. To erode these narratives which have hardly gotten us very far on the road to a more sustainable or representative world is the start of the best intellectual freedom you will ever have.

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About Me

A very down to earth* kind of guy. I'm an environmental sociologist interested in establishing material and organizational sustainability worldwide. I'm always looking for interesting materials/technologies, inspiring ideas, or institutional examples of sustainability to inspire others to recognize their choices now. To be fatalistic about an unsustainable world is a sign of a captive mind, given all our options.
*(If "earth" is defined in a planetary sense, concerning comparative historical knowledge and interest in the past 10,000 years or so anywhere...) See both blogs.